Saturday, 10 August 2013

OPTING FOR THE REAL: IN MEMORIAM KAREN BLACK

'People were opting for
the real in the Seventies. People wanted to see the human heart and
soul right in front of them.' -Karen Black

In an era of
interchangeable pinups with blownup lips and botoxed faces, Karen
Black's analysis of what made she such a remarkable actress at her
very busy peak is telling. In fact, she may give too much credit to
the filmmakers, and not enough to herself, because she was often the
best thing in imperfectly judged projections, always giving her
characters something that we, the audience, could recognise. There
was nothing symmetric or regular about her features, but to look into
those wandering eyes, especially when they were focused beyond the
screen, on you, was to feel all the thrill and danger of real life
and real love. On the dark side of a world celebrating newfound freedoms, she was the poster child for real people's vulnerability.

Karen Black projected
real. She was smart, but she could play dumb, or better, play 'real
people' a category of character which Hollywood traditionally has
ignored, or at best bent to its own perceptions ('tales of ordinary
working people portrayed by rich Hollywood stars,' as the Firesign
Theatre had it). She's best remembered for a number of roles in which
she is an under-educated working-class woman whose innate knowledge
makes her smarter than the men who use her. Think of Rayette in Five
Easy Pieces, the perfect foil to Jack Nicholson's self-indulgent
pianist, trying to find a 'real' life: she had played the hooker in
Easy Rider, and Nicholson would cast her in his directorial
debut, Drive, He Said, where
as a bored faculty wife that intelligence came to the fore. She would
also reprise Rayette in Cisco Pike, helping
Kris Kristofferson's film debut, in a film where everyone else seems
to be reprising older roles too.

She
is brilliant as Myrtle Wilson, a trapped Rayette, in the
unjustly derided 1974 version of The Great Gatsby, hugely
superior to the over-hyped Baz Luhrman glitterfest. Oddly, much of
the criticism for that film came from Jack Clayton's making it look
so beautiful, which is about the only thing Luhrman's version has
going for it. But Francis Ford Coppola's screenplay is sharp (Coppola
cast Black in their mutual film debut, the overlooked You're A
Big Boy Now,arguably Hollywood's first look at Sixties
generational change—it was made before The Graduate but
released after it) Black's Myrtel and Scott Wilson's George Wilson
are real people, and they contrast with the equally real upper-class
indifference of Bruce Dern's Tom Buchanan. Her Faye Greener, in The
Day Of The Locust, is a successful variant of the same character;
John Schlesinger's film was also criticised in 1975, but in
retrospect it stands up pretty well as an adaptation of Nathanel
West's novel—if anything it to tried to catch the image of the era,
where Black and many of the rest of the cast were busy catching the
soul, or lack thereof, of Hollywood.

So it was strange that
none of the many obituaries mentioned her role as Bett in The
Outfit, John Flynn's 1973 adaptation of a Richard Stark novel.
She's Rayette again, but she's paired with Robert Duvall's thief
Macklin, weariing a beret before Gatsby, and the relationship is real within the limited bounds of
their world. There is a truly touching phone call home at the center
of the movie's last act, in which she reveals Bett's depths and sets
up the denoument. One of my top-10 crime films, it's cast perfectly from top to
bottom, but even in such company Black stands out.

And think of the many
films in which she stood out among casts of underperforming bigger stars, or in
lackadaisical material: Portnoy's Complaint, Capricorn One
(again with Dern),
Hitchock's Family Plot,even in Nashville, where her
country singer seems far more real than, say, Ronee Blakely's, and
Blakely was a singer. She also tries hard but cannot save Altman's
post-Nashville Come Back To The Five And Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy
Dean.

Some of the obits
referred to her in her later career as a 'scream queen', but she
barely fits the modern definition, of B movie actresses who exist to
be victimised while nearly naked. She might be typed in a tradition
of What Happened To Baby Jane, or perhaps like Ingrid Pitt or Barbara
Steele, stronger actresses who relished off-beat roles. In that I was
reminded of Karen Steele, a 50s actress who came into films as a
statuesque beauty queen, but often projected too much strength and
intelligence to be cast comfortably in big pictures. But watch see her in
Ride Lonesome, and think what Karen Black could have done with a
similar role. It's too glib to say she might have succeeded in an
early era in Hollywood, in Bette Davis parts (that Bett in The
Outfit isn't totally
coincidental), but she was lucky in a sense to enter the business at
a point where there were roles for her, and unlucky that the business
changed so rapidly just when she should have been being offered roles
playing women who were more in control. Roles outside horror films.
Karen Black was a great actress, who should have been a star, and her
death, by reminding us of so many 'how it was' and 'what might have
beens' is made even sadder.

1 comment
:

Robin Ramsay
said...

Hi Mike. Very glad to see the reference to The Outfit, much underrated in my view. Oddly, the last time I saw it on TV a short section, in which one of the gangsters shows a hand wounded by Macklin - as Parker is called - played by Robert Duvall, had been removed. Weird..... Duvall is much the best version of 'Parker' and The Outfit much the best attempt to convey the atmosphere of the books.

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